Congratulations to the (fire)cracking entry by caesartg which is our runaway winner this month with no fewer than 44% of the votes! A clear winner by one of the biggest margins yet, and a great photo. In second place is AL with 8% and in joint third place with each earning 5% of the votes we have mikeroch, thestig2010, NJSantiago, ScubaScooby, Jiko and fallenembers08. Congratulations to all who entered!

As always this means the winner, caesartg, has until the end of this month to set the theme for July's assignment. Please let us know as soon as possible in this thread - thanks!

As is usual, just the two main rules apply apart from one exception that probably no-one will make use of but I thought I should add in so as not to get in the way of possible artistic genius - if you want to submit a series of strongly linked photos depicting a narrative/slice-of-life/'haiku moment' of some kind (E.g. See the October 2009 assignment), then obviously you can have more than one photo in your submission post.

Please add the usual EXIF details under the photo plus detail any post-processing. Further details and description would be great (E.g. Location, time of day, how you came to take the photo, preparation, technique, accidental aspects that had a bearing - anything that you think is relevant is probably interesting to folk here).

I'm looking forward to seeing these - grew up in a village but now live in Taiwan's highly vertical metropolis. Oh, for mossy slated rooftops, the far-off bleat of a sheepie and the wafting scent of freshly-spread cow poo!

I think the person you asked must be thinking of 'counties' which have populations in the range of the hundred thousands. In rural China, below the county level is the township level and below that level is the village level (typically the lowest bureaucratic division) and there you're talking about populations in the hundreds in most of the country. In many flat areas not too far from the cities, they do all run into each other, so it's not that similar to the kind of remote pastoral village settlements you might get in Europe but they are still organised at a very local level mainly around agriculture.

Urban areas have swollen, especially in the special economic zones, so some places that may have been rural have been taken over for industrial production and become urban.

China's rural situation is very interesting mainly due to the huge migrations into urban areas and the effect of wealthier returning migrants. In some places, there are no young people - they've all gone to the cities - and the old folk are left to keep things ticking over. In other places, like rural Hainan, there are far fewer young women than young men, partly as a result of migration to the cities or SEZs and partly due to a very strong cultural preference for male children and its effect on the male/female birth ratio.

If you're a foreigner, you may have some difficulty reaching rural communities, more so than in most countries. If you could photograph migrant communities in urban areas, basically the majority of them will have come from rural areas and they very likely bring elements of their rural lives with them and replicate some aspects. In other words, you might be able to capture something that would admirably suit the topic from rural migrants in the city.

That's actually a very good idea, I am based in guangzhou at the moment, which is about 3x the amount of people compared to my home country - Denmark. However, I am going to tibet here in July, and I hope to capture some tibetan village life photos there, or maybe something which shows the slow but inevitable chinese influence there on rural life.

That sounds really interesting, although do be careful especially in Tibet. It's not unknown for police/army to ask foreigners to surrender memory cards if they reckon you've captured something they'd rather people not see. In my work with research students based there, we had to blur people out from some of the photos as a precaution.